Columns

In 1999, after the first school gun massacre in Littleton, Colorado, the National Rifle Association barely waited two weeks to show up in town to hold a rally.
Then-NRA President Charleton Heston stood on stage, held up a rifle, and uttered their macho chant popular at the time, “From my cold dead hands.”

This week the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates approved their respective versions of the Commonwealth’s 2018-2020 Biennial Budget. There is no perfect budget, but the Senate budget that four Democratic senators and every Republican senator voted to approve is clearly the better approach for the Commonwealth and her taxpayers.

The seventh week of the 2018 General Assembly session saw both the House and the Senate unveiling their respective versions of Virginia’s Biennial Budgets. As was the case in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2014, the two spending plans are starkly different and don’t even agree on how much money Virginia will have to spend over the next two years.

Welcome to Week 7 of the Virginia General Assembly – a week in which the House and Senate each rolled out its respective version of the 2019-2020 Biennial Budget. The two versions differ substantially. The difference originates with how each chamber proposes to approach Medicaid expansion, and Medicaid expansion, in turn, has ripple effects throughout the rest of the budget.
I focus here on the House version of the budget bill because that is the one that I helped assemble.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently announced 13 indictments of Russian nationals and companies for their role in subverting our presidential election in a clear effort to elect Donald Trump as president.
This prompted the Clown-in-Chief to go into one of his patented “tweet storms,” in which he blamed everyone and everything but himself and Russia for his predicament.

This past Sunday, the House and Senate money committees released their separate versions of our Commonwealth’s biennial budget. I serve on the House Appropriations Committee and chair the Health and Human Resources subcommittee of that body. Many of you may have read the headlines that the House of Delegates is “expanding Medicaid.” Let me address some of the confusion and misinformation on this.